Windfall Orchard in Cornwall. / CALEB KENNA/for the FREE PRESS

Windfall Orchard in Cornwall. / CALEB KENNA/for the FREE PRESS

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CORNWALL — In 2002, Brad Koehler and Amy Trubek bought an 18th-century farmhouse in Cornwall with a big backyard.

Big for a yard. Small for an orchard.

Behind the house, hidden within a tangle of overgrown apple trees on an east-facing slope, was a kind of agricultural treasure trove. The aptly named Windfall Orchard — established more than half a century ago by a family doctor — is of particular beauty and relevance to the family that reclaimed it.

Koehler, 49, a graduate of New England Culinary Institute, taught at NECI before becoming general manager of residential dining services at Middlebury College. He ran the dining service at Middlebury for nine years, working in the orchard in off-hours. With a background in horticulture, Koehler left the college in 2010 to work fulltime as an orchardist.

“It was a total grown-over mess,” Koehler said the other day, walking through his trees. “It was a jungle back here. It took me about three years to prune it back into shape. We knew it was an abandoned orchard. We didn’t have the vision of all I’m doing today.”

He is managing about 400 apple trees — from dozens of heirloom varieties (100 years old or older) to apples of recent discovery. He is pressing apples for cider and creating a juice-blend from more than 30 heirlooms that is used to make an award-winning sweet dessert wine. The wine, Windfall Orchard Ice Cider, is made in collaboration with Eden Ice Cider of West Charlestown.

“As if being a chef isn’t hard enough, let me be a farmer,” Koehler said. The professions require a common set of skills — chief among these are stamina and problem-solving, he said.

Cultural heritage

Trubek, 50, a professor at the University of Vermont, is a cultural anthropologist with an interest and expertise in food — from cooking to the “taste of place.” She is the author of a book, published in 2008, “The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir.”

Terroir, from the French word for land, concerns how particular aspects of a place — including soil, climate, geography and human interaction — can influence qualities of food or drink.

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Windfall Orchard and its place in Cornwall’s apple history could be a research windfall for Trubek. She hopes one day to write about it, Trubek said.

“There’s two levels of cultural heritage that we’re really participating in,” she said. “And that has been an unexpected gift.”

One aspect concerns the orchard work of Ted Collier, and its local significance. Collier was a Middlebury physician who managed Windfall Orchard (which he named) from 1956 until his death more than 40 years later. Collier inherited a collection of apple trees (including the oldest tree at Windfall, a 1918 Rhode Island Greening) and added varieties well into the 1990s, making a bio-diverse orchard of about 80 varieties.

Collier died in 1998, about a week before the peak of McIntosh season and not long after retiring from his medical practice. His goal was to get to 100 varieties of apples at Windfall Orchard, Koehler said.

“We didn’t realize the extent to which people knew Dr. Collier and his passion for apples, because it wasn’t commercial,” Trubek said. “People understood that he was like a Johnny Appleseed of his day.... His own idea of what he was trying to accomplish was a kind of heritage preservation.”

Nancy Rucker of Middlebury, a volunteer at the Sheldon Museum, remembers Collier from the Middlebury Farmers Market. “He was known for all these wonderful varieties he had,” she said. “And he just loved to talk about them and to urge people to try them.”

Changing landscape

The second aspect of cultural heritage Trubek recognizes concerns the physical landscape of the orchard, which contains many standard apple trees (big ones), along with dwarfs and semi-dwarfs. As apple-growing moves toward high-density orchards and trellising, the landscape changes with growing techniques.

Windfall Orchard looks the way you imagine an apple orchard would: Well-spaced trees with big grey trunks, spreading branches, lush greenery and fruits of subtle shades, the slope of the land letting light fall evenly on the trees.

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The orchard, then, preserves both Collier’s legacy and a physical landscape that has its own beauty and interest, Trubek said.

“For me it was, Oh my Gosh, we’re keeping history alive,” she said. “You’re literally keeping a story about apples in the region going.”

For Koehler, the orchard represented a fascinating agricultural challenge:

• Four acres of trees that produce a changing variety of apples in a season that extends from mid-July to early November: small enough to accommodate harvesting of trees multiple times (at peak ripeness), complex enough to require vigilant attention.

(About half the trees are on Koehler’s land; the rest he manages on neighbors’ property.)

• Experimenting with and grafting of new varieties onto wild trees originally planted for pollination — with as many as five varieties of apples growing on one tree.

• Piecing together the work of Collier and carrying it on with an integrity toward the goals he articulated (Koehler found two boxes of Collier’s orchard records in the house).

• Discovering within the orchard three small overgrown nurseries, and becoming a kind of agricultural sleuth to determine what Collier had in mind.

Inching back

In reclaiming the orchard Koehler was helped in the early years by Art Blaise, who had worked with Collier. He arrived like “Yoda,” thrilled to see the orchard inching back into shape and offering considerable assistance, Koehler said.

This range means that fruit comes into season from mid-July to early November, a time of “constant picking” at Windfall, Koehler said. Apple season moves from an early variety such as Yellow Transparent (a 200-year-old sauce apple) to mid-season Macouns and late fall’s Fujis and Granny Smiths.

These days, Paula Reds are sensational right off the tree.

The orchard is finely mowed and virtually windfall-free: Windfallen apples are those that drop from the tree; they were traditionally used by orchardists to make hard cider. Thus: a windfall.

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Not an apple is wasted at Windfall Orchard, Koehler said. He retrieves from the ground fallen and smushed apples and gives them to a farmer to feed his pigs. In return Koehler gets a pig.

Unique apple

Chance seedlings have produced glorious results at Windfall Orchard, Koehler said. “Because of the way apples are pollinated, every apple has a chance to produce some sort of tree that’s unique every now and then,” he explained.

One example is called Windfall Golden, which Koehler says exists only at his orchard — an apple that kind of fought its way into survival. “It’s an outstanding apple,” he said. “We found nothing that that resembles it in any way.”

Koehler traces its origins to the doctor’s compost pile, from which he suspects Collier pulled out a sapling for the root stock. Koehler guesses that Collier planted it in one of the small, over-grown nurseries he found on the property, and never grafted it.

The tree withstood a couple of chainsaw episodes when Koehler was clearing nearby land; it survived two fires, standing as it does near the burn pile. Then it started to produce excellent fruit and Koehler has grafted it onto other trees, he said.

“I’m a niche,” Koehler said of his place in the apple world.

It’s a niche that is valued by apple experts and food pros, among others.

Collector and farmer

At the University of Vermont, soil scientist/apple researcher Terry Bradshaw (known in central Vermont and beyond for his hard cider) grows and tests about 70 varieities of apples. Scott Farm in Dummerston is the only other orchard in Vermont that, like Windfall, grows scores of varieties, he said.

“With that many varieties, you’re almost as much a collector as you are a farmer,” Bradshaw said. Of thousands of apple varieties, many hundreds are suited to this region, he said.

“There are certainly a lot more unique and interesting varieties than the eight or 10 people usually come across in orchards and grocery stores,” Bradshaw said.

From a management perspective, growing, tending and harvesting scores of varieties is “kind of a nightmare,” Bradshaw said. But he understands the appeal:

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“Why grow five varieties when there’s 85 you can try out?” he asked. In addition, customers at farmers markets appreciate the changing variety through the season, “the next cool thing” arriving every week, Bradshaw said.

For Steve Atkins, chef/co-owner of The Kitchen Table Bistro in Richmond, cooking with and eating a variety of apples has enhanced a season he has long held dear.

“For me, personally, I love apples in general and I love the nostalgia of what apple season brings for cooking in New England — the warm, comforting stuff.”

Every autumn, the Kitchen Table hosts an apple-themed dinner using apples from Windfall Orchard. Each course of the dinner, scheduled this year for Oct. 24, centers around apples and is conceived for the varieties ripening that week.

“Growing up I knew Macs and maybe Red Delicious and that was about it,” Atkins said. “Apples are so much more than this one thing. Every one has a completely different flavor and texture and aroma. It’s a lot of fun.”

The oldest apple tree at Windfall Orchard is a Rhode Island Greening. The name of the variety was wrong in an earlier version of the story.